Building Role Clarity in My Own Backyard

In my experience within organizations, we talk about role clarity like it’s a no-brainer – as if the vaguely written job descriptions that we haven’t seen since we started working make sense. Or as if the needs of the organization, or the roles that keep its engine running, never change.

I like to imagine that role clarity – who does which pieces of the organization’s work – is particularly challenging for small businesses like Floricane. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that I was the sales manager, marketing director, accountant and bookkeeper, janitor, administrative assistant, project coordinator and lead facilitator for the business.

One of the messiest parts of building a team came from a combination of my own inability to let go of work and my team’s reluctance to take it away from me. You might see how those two complimented each other in the worst of ways.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been meeting individually and as a group with our team. We that time clarifying our roles – both as we run the business, and as we work to meet the needs of each of our clients. Not in a vacuum, and not as an exercise on paper, but built around the way we have been working together for several months now.

I’ve been letting go. They’ve been stepping up. And our clients are getting better results.

Fewer balls are dropped. There’s less milling about, wondering who’s on first. Our engagement is higher, and my stress is lower.

We’ll regroup every several weeks in 2014 to make adjustments, and keep building clarity.

Engagement Takes Time

I’ve recently worked very hard to put some action behind my words –having in-depth meetings with each member of the Floricane team. I’ve asked them for specific feedback to help me better support their success. I’ve challenged them to engage their teammates, and stretch themselves. I’ve asked them to challenge me more.

In our planning conversations for 2014, what I’ve really done is tried – through my actions – to let each member of the Floricane team know how much they matter to our business, and that their contributions are not invisible.

It wasn’t easy carving 12 hours out of my calendar during a very busy December, but it has been important. I’ve limped away from these conversations, mindful that the feedback offered is for my benefit. I’ve danced away, inspired by the commitment of our small team. And I’ve walked away with a real sense of confidence about the coming year.

Engagement takes time. The payoff is powerful.

Floricane’s Seven Goals for 2014

After five years of sprinting, the team at Floricane is settling in for the long haul. In the coming year, our small team is focused on seven simple goals – our version of a short-term strategic plan.

In the past, I went into a cave for a few days at the end of the year – or my living room at three in the morning – and tried to write an essay on all of the loose ends and unresolved opportunities that Floricane needed to address in the year ahead. I’d emerge, wave it around at my team for a few days and life would get busy.

We warn our clients about people like me.

Floricane’s 2014 plan emerged earlier this year – in September – over lunch with Caroline, our events and marketing manager. An hour-long discussion about social media turned into a small list of ideas about what was important to the business. We came back to the office and used our trademark Sharpies® to capture the ideas on a large sheet of paper.

Our plan evolved over several team meetings until we all agreed that our four goals were the right goals for Floricane. In our year-end meetings, we’ve each mapped out our own individual game plan to help move each goal forward in 2014.

Here’s a look at our business goals for the year:

• Our marketing has the right energy: We’re proud of our brand, and its energy, and the way people tell us it is received, and perceived, in the community. In 2014, we’re rebuilding almost everything from the ground up – our website, our social media presence, our printed materials. It needs to be true to who Floricane is becoming.
   
• We’re partnering and connecting for impact: As we grow and get busier, it gets harder to whimsically throw together random, cool events with random, cool organizations that we love. But we don’t want to stop. Whether it’s the small business unconference, Tilted, or an amazing leadership conference, we want to do great things with great people.
   
• Our events are amazing: When people take time out of their busy schedules to learn with us, they should have remarkable experiences. The communications, the look and the feel, the content and the learning – it all has to resonate, and astound.
   
• We all do business development: Floricane is now a business of five talented people. Each of us have different communities, and different gifts. Letting the world see Floricane through all 10 of our eyes only helps our business.
   
• We work to make our best work better: We do good work. We can do better work. By strengthening our collaboration, our processes and our tool kits, we make it more likely that our clients will get great results.
   
• We maintain and strengthen relationships: The heart of our business? We care about the people and the organizations we touch, and who touch us. Staying connected, and connecting without expectation of return, matters deeply to us.
   
• We are experts: Sharpening our saws, and strengthening our ability to deliver quality results, can’t be left to chance. Each member of our team will be spending 10% of their time learning in 2014.

We’re excited about the year ahead. Having a plan to help us be better at what we do adds to that excitement. 

Best 13 of 2013

Looking back on a year is always fun, especially when you discover tons of forgotten moments that made up the year in question. From that perspective,2013 was filled with clients, projects and moments that have blurred quite a bit in the rearview mirror – some better forgotten, and many others worth remembering.

But 2013 also had some solid standout moments for the team at Floricane, and we’ve picked 13 that we just happen to really love. They’re not in any particular order, so enjoy!

• Tilted: The small business unconference we organized with a dozen other business owners last February was not only fun, it had a real impact. More than 140 people attended the full-day event, and it was such a hit we’re bringing it back later this winter!
• TEDxGraceStreet: On a whim, we decided to partner with Wren Lanier, Lauren Boynton and a few other local creative stars to host a urban-centered TED event. It was part of a global TEDxCity program, and we think the 13 speakers who tackled Richmond-specific topics for a crowd of 150 people at the Richmond Times-Dispatch building were all pure genius. It was a day thick with inspiration.
• Summer of Self-Discovery: Our four-part, public workshop series on leadership and self-awareness was a fun romp – and we were delighted to have more than 75 people join us as we dove into concepts like emotional intelligence and situational leadership. We’re doing a winter series in January, and will be back in 2014 with another summer program.
• Sales Effectiveness Pilot: Theran and Debra pulled together a very cool pilot program designed to leverage the Insights Discovery self-awareness tool to boost sales effectiveness. A dozen-plus employees from One South Realty and Dodson Properties Management agreed to be guinea pigs in the pilot, and provided us with great feedback.
• Library of Virginia Feedback: Speaking of feedback, inviting a small group from the Library of Virginia to sit down and pepper us with very candid, and useful, feedback about our long-term engagement with their organization was huge for our team. You can read more about it in a future blog post, but suffice to say – we got an earful!
• The Daily Planet: It’s hard to pick a favorite client, but it’s also hard to beat the day we spent with the entire 70+ person team from The Daily Planet. Huge energy, strong relationships and a massive sense of purpose characterized this team of providers who serve Richmond’s homeless community. We left energized and uplifted just by being in the same room as these guys.
• First Chair with CarMax: Our collaborative leadership project with the Richmond Symphony is always a blast, and sometimes everything just clicks when Maestro Steven Smith, the musicians, 60+ employees from a local company and I take to the stage. That’s what happened with CarMax last fall. We’re hoping to do five First Chair events in 2014 with the Symphony.
• Coaching Takes Off: When Debra’s coaching calendar goes from zero to one hundred in a matter of weeks, it’s a good thing. The amount of executive, leadership, personal and group coaching our team did in 2013 was nothing short of astounding. Clients like Bon Secours, the Library of Virginia, Richmond Association of Realtors and Draper Aden Associates took full advantage of our professional coaches. (Our coaches are staggering into 2014, ready for more!)
• Caroline Goes Full-Time (and Theran Joins the Team): Caroline Moyer didn’t miss a beat when she transitioned from part-time to full-time – our first full-time employee, by the way – in May. And that was about the time Theran Fisher joined our team to provide project support and facilitation on a project (and then another, and another, and then many more). We’re so lucky to have them both on our team.
• We Got a Bookkeeper: It sounds silly, right? Having Terri Andrus stop by our offices every two weeks to reconcile our books has been completely liberating.
• Two weeks of unplugged vacation: My family may have been the biggest beneficiary in 2013, as I took two weeks of unplugged time away from the business to be with them. Next year, the goal is four weeks!
• Gelati Celesti x2: In addition to working with the Gelati Celesti team as they worked to identify what makes the world’s greatest ice cream employees – and how to treat them like gold! – we parked their truck outside of our offices in July for an ice cream social. With Floricane ice cream. Yum!
• 1E: Our collaborative home in the Richmond Times-Dispatch building is almost completely full, and we’re exploring growth plans with the RTD team for 2014. With more than a dozen creatives from five companies working in the space, it has become a lively, fun home. We can’t wait to see how things shake out in 1E in 2014.

The Last Blog Post (by Carlee)

It finally happened.  I fulfilled the epitome of an intern duty and went on a coffee run. It only took me 13 weeks but I finally fetched coffee (it was enough coffee for a 50-person workshop, to be specific).

As I made this realization on the way to Starbucks, I laughed, and then realized how lucky I have been this summer. I walked into Floricane in May not knowing what to expect. I was eager to learn and ready to be challenged. 

I learned, I was challenged, but most unexpectedly, I was welcomed with open arms as a part of the team. I was given business cards, put on the website, and asked my opinion. I was trusted to go out on my own and represent Floricane to close clients and friends.  And every week, for better or worse, John let me voice my thoughts and reflections on this blog for the entire world to see (hello entire world, thanks for reading).

This quick and intentional integration into the Floricane family was a gift beyond what I expected.

As I journey back to Nashville to wrap up my degree, I will bring with me a vast knowledge of leadership development. I will bring a language to talk about self-awareness and other awareness (though it might be interesting when it’s a foreign language to all my friends and classmates).  I will bring a remembrance of the power of gratitude.  I’ll bring a connection to a group of people and a community.

I will bring all these things, but I will bring so much more. 

So John, Debra, Theran, and Caroline, thank you.  Thanks for accepting me and teaching me.  Thanks for treating me as an equal and valuing who I am.  And thanks for creating a space that was so much more than coffee-fetching and paper-copying. 

Building a framework

This summer I was tasked with illustrating Floricane’s leadership philosophy. Before I arrived, I honestly didn’t know what that meant or what it would look like. After a summer of conversations with clients, partners, and friends, conversations with all of the Floricane team, observations, research into Floricane materials, and personal “expertise,” I had a little bit better of an idea.   So off I went creating a Floricane leadership model with the Floricane team. Last week, I had the opportunity to test drive this model during my final leadership conversation of the summer. 

I’m so glad I did.

I received very insightful and important feedback from that conversation that culminated in two areas of clarification:

There is a lot to “leadership.”  It’s hard to summarize the extent of everything that goes into leadership development clearly and succinctly into one image or even onto one page.  There are a significant number of tools, behaviors, and techniques that are central to Floricane’s leadership practice that did not make the cut.  Though important, adding everything to the illustration would have resulted in an illustration that would have looked a little something like this:

The study of leadership has been around a long time. Creating a Floricane “model” did not mean creating a completely novel idea about leadership that didn’t already exist out there in the world. The Floricane practice of leadership was not developed in a vacuum.  It came from years of study, practice, and influence from other principles and approaches.

That being said, the Floricane framework is not a brand new way to understand leadership. Rather, it is the illustration of the values and ideals that Floricane works to cultivate in other people. The illustration is some part transformational leadership, some part emotional intelligence, all part of what makes Floricane, well, Floricane. 

It’s the place Floricane starts and the place Floricane comes back to.  The illustration is the very core of what Floricane believes in terms of leadership.

Tracking progress

Long ago, a manager of mine tried to help me see the importance of tracking results. Not tracking progress, or drawing lines through completed tasks, but seriously evaluating whether the work I was doing was having the impact it needed to have. "We do what we pay attention to," he'd tell me.

I’m a slow learner.

This summer, Floricane finally started tracking a set of business metrics. It’s an attempt to help our team focus on a small, manageable data set to better evaluate the progress of the business. After many conversations, we settled on five pieces of data – four are numbers, and one is a list:

Year-to-date revenue (over last year’s year-to-date revenue)

New clients to-date (over new clients to-date last year)

New projects to-date (over new clients to-date last year)

Business development activities (month over month)

Projects, activities and events on the calendar for the next 60 days

Getting started, it’s been exciting to see that 2013 is shaping up to be a banner year for Floricane. But it’s been more rewarding to engage in conversations as a team about what we each can do to help move the numbers in a positive direction – and why that is important for each of us.

We’re not convinced that these five measurements are the right yardsticks for our business, but they’re a good starting point. And they’re certainly helping us focus our time and attention on what it takes to run and grow a small business.

Breathing into art(180)

One of my favorite organizations in town – admittedly, I have quite a few favorites – is ART 180, which has been doing genius work at the intersection of art, youth and opportunity for 15 years. Interestingly enough, ART 180 and Floricane have been dating since before there was a Floricane – I spent some time talking about facilitating a board retreat with the organization when I was at Luck Stone six or seven years ago.

The longer we’ve dated, the more I’ve fallen in love. Last summer, I spent an evening with ART 180’s youth leaders – teenagers whose lives were impacted by ART 180, and now play an active role in shaping the organization’s work. We came together to dream about the look, the feel, the energy of ART 180’s planned new space on West Marshall Street.

I had an opportunity to see that space last month, and it is an amazing home. It feels like ART 180, and the attention to detail sings out as you explore the space.

We're getting together with the board and staff of ART 180 tonight to go through some organizational breathing exercises. ART 180 has accomplished a great deal in its 15 years, but the past two years have been a period of remarkable growth and progress for the arts organization.

Breathing into another 15 years of changing lives. That’s meditation with meaning.